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MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Objective

"Assessments of individual behaviour play important roles in research and organisations. Questionnaire scales are widely used as efficient tools for standardised assessments. But the ways in which people understand these tools and by which they generate their answers to standardised scales are still poorly understood. There is also still little description of how well people’s verbal reports actually represent observable individual behaviours and the ways in which they may reflect social beliefs and stereotypes. The AIDA project will explore how people assess and socially categorise individuals and will critically analyse the methods used for standardised assessments. It aims to unravel potential biases derived from stereotypes about gender and ethnicity, focussing on “Black” and “White” as prototypical categories of ethnicities that are at the centre of many social conflicts worldwide. A novel transdisciplinary paradigm and cutting-edge methodologies and technologies will be used to systematically deconstruct the requirements that assessment tasks impose on respondents and to reconstruct the social knowledge and the psychological processes involved therein. People’s interpretations and uses of standardised scales and social categories will be explored in the context of Online surveys and in interpersonal discussions about videotaped behaviours displayed with the same intensity by men or women of either “Black” or “White” ethnicity while the participants’ subjective views of these videos will be captured with miniature cameras. Interviewing people about their own first-person recordings activates episodic memory and enables in-depth reconstruction of psychological processes during assessment generation. These ground-breaking techniques represent major progress urgently needed to restore the match between psychological phenomena and the methods used for their investigation and will open up new horizons for evidence-based explorations of the workings of the human mind."